Abrupt Change Of Career

[bednobs]

anyone else here having an abrupt change of career to teacher from next week? And bricking it as much as i am?

[jim360]

Those examples were taken from your own writing, Andy :)

One might wonder what the point of education even is, if not to sometimes understand the finer details. Not everyone *needs* to be a mechanic, but everyone could do with learning how to construct decent and non-repetitive English sentences. The "fronted adverbial" is merely a posh name for something we all practise, from time to time: mixing up word-order for effect. Sadly, that point has been lost, and rather than celebrating the fact that children at school are learning good writing techniques, adults prefer to argue that there's no point in learning stuff they didn't know. Shouldn't children learn things we didn't?

[Peter Pedant]

fronted adverbial - - is that a plant

Here are some examples: Before sunrise, Zack ate his breakfast. After the rain stopped, Sophie went outside to play.

Both temporal phrases I notice - in Dutch this is a "temporal adjunct" and MUST come first
and also must be up front in Mandarin
and is frequently up front in BBC signed english -

ho hum the alternative is the Firearms Act - not my fave reading

[Peter Pedant]

// Those examples were taken from your own writing, Andy :)//

mama pointed out that going over someone elses dicta on AB ( scripta then) with accusatory intent
is just Not Done on AB - altho when it was done to me the other night I felt rather flattered that someone had spent time latterly reading what I had written. I mean how long did it take them - slow reader or what?

BUT

andie is the only one of us who has had work published and get paid for it innit? yes get people to pay him for what he writes

the nearest I got was a technical editor saying to me "I will print whatever you write". His successor put me right again - and refused everything until I gave up submitting.

so well done andie !

[bednobs]

i think it was me moaning about fronted adverbials last year

[Canary42]

The problem with education covering seemingly obscure stuff like fronted adverbials is where do you draw the line - some pupils may lock in to it and a successful career in academia or authorship for example may blossom. What makes it difficult of course is the sheer width of possible topics. One person's meat is another person's poison.

But modern teaching does seem to me (admittedly with limited and hearsay evidence) to be better then in my day (the 50s). For example, music teaching then was solely singing dreary old songs beaten out on an old piano with no instruction/assistance, just get on with it. Much later in life (late 1980s) I attended a music tutorial as part of an Open University Course given by a music enthusiast with a totally inclusive teaching method, and I learnt more in 2 hours than in all my time at school, and almost regretted not having had the opportunity to take up music as a career. I wonder what else I had missed in being subjected to a school regime run by an older generation who mainly got their jobs when the younger ones went off to war, and were just spinning out the time to their retirement, sod the annoying kids.

[TheDevil]

During the time any kids are off school would be a great time to teach them how to cook, clean, be a bit more independent

[jim360]

Once you realise that "fronted adverbials" sounds much more obscure than it actually is, though, what is the reason to oppose teaching it? Only that some adults don't know the term themselves, nothing else.

[jno]

jim, without wishing to sound like your grandmother, I was never taught what a fronted adverbial was (it's possible the term wasn't in existence then) and have managed okay. The question for me isn't "why not teach it?" but "why teach it?" I was taught some up-to-date linguistic theory at university, and sometimes reminisce about it with friends, but none of us can remember exactly what it was or what we were supposed to do with it. It seemed at the time like something that would probably useful if you were going to be an academic, which none of us did. Hence my query about whether this is something pre-teens need to know.

[bednobs]

fronted adverbials rock (apparently)

[bednobs]

"During the time any kids are off school would be a great time to teach them how to cook, clean, be a bit more independent"
she already knows all that

[tiggerblue10]

Yep....and continue working from home as well.

[jourdain2]

Jackdaw 13.18 I haven't checked with my Fowler, but I've been trying to help my grandson with KS2 and I yelled, "What the heck is a fronted adverbial?" They've changed the terminology and it sounds complicated. Another is 'Determinators' - again, I went blank; but it is simply definite and indefinite articles plus other quantity indicators such as 'many', 'most, and 'some'. I think I will dig out my Fowler and have a good dive into it during the confined days to come. There's quite a lot for 10 yr. olds to have to be able to identify - the effect of modal verbs seems a bit excessive to me, but I suppose that sort of question sorts out the very able.